Let me show the math:

The base M4 model is 16GB ram and 256 GB of storare and it costs $600, “cheapest minipc ever with such performance”.

The 512GB storage model costs $800.

May I point out that 256GB of ssd storage does not cost $200.

The 24 GB model costs exactly $1000.

No matter how much ram prices are ramping up right now, 8GB of sodimm ram does not cost $200…yet.

Anything else above those specs throws the Mac mini into $1k+ territory. It can go all the way up to $2600.

Now, Apple rarely publishes manufacturing numbers to the public. But historically this has always been their strategy. A base product that seems too good to be true (because it is) that leaves buyers wanting a bit more. For which they get skinned alive, price wise. Of course, I can’t be 100% certain that the base Mac mini is sold at a loss. But evidence suggests the $600 mark is priced exactly to act as a loss leader.

They are so neatly seated though. Perfect columns.

Apple mini is a hard comparison to make because the cheapest mini is a loss leader. Add a bit of extra ram or extra storage, which you have to do since the base model is very limited and the only way to get it is through Apple because everything is soldered together, then it is suddenly more than a $1k PC. They make the profits up with those upgrades which are practically mandatory and grossly overpriced.

I guess they are including the screen, the keyboard and the trackpad with the Windows license in those $200 estimates.

Again, who cares? A sale for Valve is money into Linux gaming support. Still not a bad thing. I don’t care what corporations use in their daily work. It is me who wants to use Linux for gaming.

But I doubt it will happen, if a ton of companies want to buy hundreds of computers at a time, they won’t buy from Valve. They have their own vendors who sell in bulk at lower prizes. Corporations today acquire mostly laptops for day to day office work and mini PCs for service stations. High power workstations usually exceed the steam machine by a whole order of magnitude in required specs, and it is way too powerful just to shift spreadsheets around. The mid range independent creator space and mid range studios might see some use for it if it’s cheap. But I don’t see them causing scarcity of the machine itself. There are other just as cheap options purpose made for office work.

It’s Fedora based. If you want to develop on it, it supports containerized workflows. There’s a DX version explicitly designed for developers.

Their definition of experienced user is being able to follow an online guide to tap 5 times in a menu to enable developer mode. It is all a big joke.

Gaming away from mtx and daily reward grinds, and also single player experiences without the competitive pressure can be beneficial. It is also a low effort activity that distracts from work only mindsets and it’s been proven to be a net positive for rest in contrast with social media doom scrolling.

That wouldn’t be a bad thing. A lot of the trailer footage was dedicated to showing video editing and 3d modeling software (it’s just a PC, was one of the marketing lines). They want people to buy this machine. Who cares if they aren’t gamers. Valve also sells digital creative software on Steam.

No, they wouldn’t care. It’s a mild annoyance at worst. Nothing critical was lost. Maybe stop putting money into digital goods that have no tangible value and zero guarantee of property.

Yes, and that is why I’m hopeful for more RISC-V development. One day, maybe, there will be first party manufacturers making open devices that work easily with any software of choice instead of proprietary vendor lock-in.

Which contradicts his position that cheating is a massive huge front to wage an endless war on. 13 people is a ban list, not a cry for rootkits on all clients. It stands to reason that if Linux was 0.01% and even if they were all cheating, it is not a massive problem. Is it tiny or is it massive? It can’t be both at the same time.

Complement with the alternative view offered by the developer of ΔV: Rings of Saturn. Also, there’s a lot of erased responses and contradicting tweets he made.

It isn’t. Cheating is a game culture problem, not a technical problem. Just to counter example. Rust is filled with cheaters precisely because they haven’t done everything they can to fix cheating. They are culturally fixated in a single lane thinking. As a result, they’re flooded with cheaters (plenty on Windows) who exploit their inflexible strategies. This is top Flanders “we haven’t done anything and we are all out of ideas”. Linux is not the source of cheating on Rust either, but he’s arguing as if it is. He is lazy. That’s not bad on itself, but he is also disingenuous and is arguing in bad faith.

Make server side anti cheat and suddenly what OS the player is running becomes irrelevant.

Edit: another contradiction in their argument. Linux was less than 0.1% of the Rust user base. But, Linux was also the biggest source of cheating? How? It is just a disingenuous and dumb argument made to spite Linux out of hatred. It has no basis in reality.

That guy was roasted on Twitter for that comment, and rightfully so. Most bug reports came from Linux users because Linux users actually know how to file them. Windows users are learned helplessness little rats, they see software as black boxes and developers as evil wizards who don’t talk to anyone. Complaining about software to them is speaking to the Eldrich gods and risks burning their retinas and throwing them into madness by their answer.

Linux user knows that software is just something people do, and if you ask nicely and comcompetently, then a human being will try their best to assist you. Above all, Foss users are drilled that if something doesn’t work, report it so it might get fixed in the future. It’s part of the collaborative effort into software openness, bug reports are free QA. Unlike proprietary culture that sees bug reports as customer support requests.

It was a most poignant situation because, as reported by another developer who blogged about Linux support positively, all of the bug reports filed by Linux gamers are about bugs that affect everyone playing the game and not Linux specific support requests. Since Linux users know how to file bug reports and have done so before, they are usually of higher quality than Windows users bug reports who don’t know how to extract information out of their system or might not even have the tools to do so.

Finished means it’s feature complete according to the specification and feature frozen. It says nothing of bugs. Bugs are ethereal qualities, subject to opinion and criteria chosen for triage. Sudo is finished, it does what is meant to do. Does it do it bug free? For the most part it does. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any bugs left. But no new bugs are expected to be introduced by active development. Any bugs that arise, and it has been the case for a long time, will be old bugs that haven’t been discovered yet.

I’ve followed RISC-V development. It is so promising and so cool. But it is also under-cooked right now, I don’t think it is ready to carry such a product. It might get better in the future, but as it stands it takes way too much effort to release a hardware product using it, never mind a high performant one like a gaming console. My hope is that the EU and FOSS initiatives can take a stronghold on the standard up to the point that it becomes a feasible competitor to Qualcomm and it retains it’s openness. It is the only way stuff like a truly spyware free and privacy respecting smartphone can exist. Linux will never thrive with the hostile hellscape that is ARM hardware. Valve themselves have had to fight with the stubbornness of a myriad consortiums that want to gatekeep their modules and refuse to offer open source software. RISC-V just needs a lot of love and care for now to grow into a competitive standard. Many cool developers are working on it but it doesn’t have the same financial effort behind it that ARM has.

play video/mirror your desktop

They have demos of those things in the trailer. Apparently the pass-through is black and white, but it supports peripherals, so adding a color HD camera to the front to pass-through HQ video while desktop working is completely feasible. It is also just a linux computer, so if Valve doesn’t develop the software for it, someone will. Essentially kicking the (very tiny and limited) vision pro market out from under Apple.

They don’t have to manufacture them all. That little SteamOS Compatible sticker is gonna kick Windows out of the gaming throne and push steam machines as the default livingroom gaming solution. One of the big things about this announcement is that it isn’t addressed only to customers, it is aimed at developers. The store page even has sections to announce that development kits are available. They want the software and hardware developers onboard, that’s how they are going to push out competition.

“Powerful PC gaming in an open ecosystem”

Valve just kicked the teeth of all console makers with this announcement. If only they manage to ship and distribute globally they would single-handedly threat taking over the entire gaming industry (hardware side) in a single generation. Of course, it’s well to wait for reviews, hands on demonstrations and the reality that comes out of this. But I bet there’s more than one MS an Sony executive who were apprehensive of seeing this day arrive.

Also: the fact they doubled down on the Steam Machine name. It’s like a huge FU to all OEM manufacturers who laughed at them in 2017.